Welcome to the LEDs Magazine weekly newsletter for Dec. 11, 2019. Our Strategies in Light team is deep into the implementation process for the Feb. 11–13, 2020 event in San Diego. We are also devoting considerable time to make our Sapphire Awards Event our best night out ever. I’m told not to call it the Sapphire Gala this year because there will be no tuxedos — in fact, there will be no heels — on the flight deck of the Midway aircraft carrier.
But what a night, and bargain, we have in store for you. A mere $50 will enable you to explore the carrier turned museum and even enjoy interactive activities. We will have tapas and top-shelf refreshments, entertainers, and of course the chance to watch the superstars of the solid-state lighting (SSL) and LEDs sectors receive their Sapphire trophies. Make plans with industry friends and make a night of it, because we will have networking and drinks continuing once the award presentations are complete.
Moving to news, I thought I would be telling you that the Osram saga was settled this week. Late Friday, ams and Osram announced a deal whereby 8600-employee ams would acquire 23,500-employee Osram. But the margin for required tendered shares was slight. And we’ve since learned more about German laws that impact such deals. Well, I say learned more, but I really don’t understand how an acquirer can gain the right to direct operations of the company being acquired yet have no direct control of cash held by the company being acquired. So now the somewhat-unlikely dance partners enter another waiting period in which ams will try and win more share tenders. Stay tuned for more.
In our Smart Lighting & IoT newsletter on Monday, I promised a story to come on a new Acuity Brands connected lighting option. The company has announced a low-voltage DC-based distributed power scheme with integral connectivity called Modulus. Modulus is unique in DC schemes in that it can be mixed and matched in a facility with some standard AC/DC-powered luminaires. The DC grid segments will gain some energy efficiency, simpler installation, and granular controls with 16 dimming and/or tunable zones on each DC segment of an SSL installation.
Meanwhile, in the area of lighting for health and wellbeing, we have a contributed piece that summarizes recent work completed by the Lighting Research Center (LRC) located at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. The research accomplished with cooperation of the US General Services Administration used custom-designed, color-tunable luminaires to explicitly deliver carefully selected light doses with spectral power distributions (SPDs) intended to impact factors such as alertness or sleep patterns. The work will help the field of lighting for health to move toward the ability to tailor impactful light exposure in a manner that delivers positive benefits.
In this newsletter space last week, I mentioned a Power over Ethernet (PoE) webcast that was to take place later that day focused on smart buildings. If you missed that webcast, catch it on demand. It’s an opportunity to hear about a facility professional’s hands-on experience with choosing PoE-based SSL and the challenges in making the relatively large installation a success. Our Carrie Meadows has more elegantly written about the presentation in a blog post.
You will find many more stories of interest in the body of today’s newsletter. Please note my relatively new email address. And always feel free to contact me to discuss content we post or to pitch a contributed article.
- Maury Wright, (858) 748-6785, [email protected]